Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [25]
Isis finds Osiris near Byblos and frees him from the chest but then Seth chops Osiris’s body into fourteen parts and scatters them over Egypt. After a long search, Isis finds all the missing parts save one-the phallus. Indeed, many Egyptian spells are dedicated to reanimating the phallus.17 Then, grief-stricken Isis, wife and sister of Osiris, reconstitutes the body and restores it to life with the help of Anubis, by means of the mummification process:
Look: I have found you lying on your side, O completely inert one! My sister, said Isis to Nephthys, it is our brother, this. Come, that we may lift up his head! Come that we may reassemble his bones! Come that we may erect a protective barrier before him! Let this not remain inert in our hands! Flow, lymph that comes from this blessed one! Fill the canals, form the names of the watercourses! Osiris, live, Osiris! May the completely inert one who is on his side rise. I am Isis.18
Isis buries all the body parts but, since she is not able to find Osiris’s penis (it has been thrown into the Nile), she makes him an artificial one.19 As is clear here, this action somehow refers yet again to the Nile’s flood and its perceived creativity while also symbolizing that even the funerary cult cannot bring back the power of generation to the dead king. Isis then impregnates herself magically with the relics of Osiris and gives birth to Horus (or Harpocrates, as he was known in Greek), sired by her brother and husband Osiris.
While Osiris becomes lord of the underworld, his son Horus, the falcon-headed sun god of Upper Egypt, stays permanently on earth, fighting continuously with his uncle Seth, the ruler of chaos, until he succeeds both in battle and in the courtroom. The pharaoh is both Osiris and Horus, in two different sequential “avatars,” attempting to live up to the divine symbol systems of the Upper and Lower Egypts, as well as this world and the next. The reigning pharaoh is identified with Horus, so these battles are mythologically equivalent with the battle to keep civilization safe in war and to rule wisely in court, the two great venues of the pharaoh on earth. The dead pharaoh is transformed by mortuary ritual into Osiris, where his responsibilities change to the good government of the dead. A stable and intact tomb was a symbol of prosperity and harmony between this world and the next. But the physical intactness of the tomb certainly also provided the launching pad that allowed its inhabitant to ascend to heaven. As Morenz says,
Logically, and as a rule, ascent to heaven and existence there are linked with the heliopolitan doctrine and are counterpart to the dominion of Osiris over the dead. This is expressed most distinctly in an address of the sky-goddess Nut to the dead king: “Open up your place in the sky among the stars of the sky for you are the Lone Star…; look down upon Osiris when he governs the spirits, for you stand far from him, you are not among them and you shall not be among them.” Accordingly, the desire is voiced that the king should not die, or his death is simply denied: “Rise up … for you have not died;” or: “My father has not died the death, for my father possesses a spirit [in] the horizon.”20
Meanwhile, back on earth, the strife between Seth and Horus continues into the next generation. Finally, Atum-Re intervenes, telling Seth and Horus to stop quarreling. Seth invites Horus to his house for a banquet. During the night, Seth inserts his penis between Horus’s thighs in an act of homosexual frottage, seemingly establishing his dominance over him, but Horus catches Seth’s semen in his hands, afterwards delivering it to his mother Isis.